The search for truth in Iraq

When CLAS alumnus Charles Duelfer (’74 MA, history) was sent to Iraq in 2004 by President George W. Bush to find out why the administration had been wrong about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he was assured by his old friend George Tenet, CIA director, that they wanted “just the truth.”

But Duelfer responded, “How deep do you want?”

“There’s always another explanation,” he told faculty and students at the Storrs campus during a talk he gave as part of his national book tour in March 2009.

Duelfer’s book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, examines how Iraq and the U.S. twice misled each other into war.

Both sides understood information only in light of hypotheses that fit their own assumptions, he said.

“We thought Saddam Hussein would be crazy not to have WMDs,” he said, and, “Saddam missed the import of 9-11.”

He said that critical thinking might have raised the questions: “What are your assumptions? What are Saddam’s? Can you see something that you don’t have a word for?”

Duelfer, an intelligence officer and former deputy chairman of UNSCOM, the UN Special Commission on weapons inspection in Iraq after the first Gulf War, said his mission in 2004 was not to find WMD but to find the truth.

He also wanted to learn how Saddam Hussein, whom he had debriefed after he was captured, and his regime had operated.

“It was an opportunity to record things that would not exist again.” And that, he says, is where his background as a student of history was helpful.

The report of his Iraq Survey Group in the fall of 2004, often called the Duelfer Report, was described by the Washington Post as contradicting nearly every pre-war assertion made by top Bush administration officials about Iraq.

The administration’s most costly mistake was not that it was wrong about WMD, but that it elected not to take advantage of the CIA’s understanding and judgment about Iraq in its post-Saddam planning, Duelfer said.

CIA involvement was blocked, and decisions to fire Iraqi Army officers and treat Ba’ath party members as “the enemy” caused huge problems, he said.

Today, “we’re in a fairly decent place,” in Iraq, he said. “But we could have been there four years ago. We paid a huge price.”

This one-day conference brings together scholars and journalists at the University of Connecticut and across the U.S. to discuss the various forms that authoritarianism is taking in the world today, from the Philippines to India, to Honduras and Venezuela, to Europe and the United States. It also aims to place this authoritarianism in historical perspective, comparing it to the anti-democratic currents of yesterday, whether in fascist Europe or in the Cold War dictatorships of Latin America.

About CLAS

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is the academic core of learning and research at UConn. We are committed to the full spectrum of academics across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We give students a liberal arts and sciences education that empowers them with broad knowledge, transferable skills, and an ability to think critically about important issues across a variety of disciplines.